11/19/2016

Past experiments have hinted that animals can feel sympathy. Rats and monkeys had been found to forgo food to avoid delivering electric shocks to relatives. Similarly, apes have recently been documented consoling one another after conflicts. However, all these experiments and observations were demonstrating an animal's sensitivity to distress in other members of the same species. Deborah Custance and Jennifer Mayer of Goldsmiths College, London, set out to see if dogs could detect the emotional state of humans.

To do this, Dr Custance and Ms Mayer conducted an experiment to study the response of dogs when a nearby human suddenly began to cry. The researchers knew that interpreting responses would be difficult, since dogs tend to whine, nuzzle, lick, lay their heads in laps and fetch toys for people in distress. Although such actions hint at a dog wishing to offer comfort, they could also be signs of curiosity, or suggest that a dog is simply distressed by seeing its master upset.

….

Dr Custance and Ms Mayer suspected that if exposure to crying led dogs to feel distress, then regardless of who was crying, the dog would go to their master to seek comfort. They also theorised that if curiosity, rather than empathy, was the driving force, then the humming would cause dogs to engage with people.

As they report in Animal Cognition, “person-oriented behaviour” did sometimes take place when either the stranger or the owner hummed, but it was more than twice as likely to occur if someone was crying. This indicated that dogs were differentiating between odd behaviour and crying. And of the 15 dogs in the experiment that showed person-oriented responses when the stranger cried, all of them directed their attention towards the stranger rather than their owner.

As a dog-owner, I'm consistently entertained how these kinds of experiments experiments (I’ve seen others about whether dogs have personalities, which they do) only show what any dog-owner already knows as a matter of daily experience. Yes, the last line of the article does hang a lampshade on a dog-owner’s disbelief that any peer-researched article is necessary to establish that dog’s respond to emotional cues, but still I must laugh that we’re still at this stage of understanding the psyche of man’s best friend.

Charles Darwin frequently used dogs to illustrate the way that animals would express their emotions in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. He plainly understood that emotions and personality were not limited to human beings. Being a man who had quite a fondness for the animals, Darwin frequently wrote quite warmly about the canine emotional life:

But man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master. Nor can these movements in the dog be explained by acts of volition or necessary instincts, any more than the beaming eyes and smiling checks of a man when he meets an old friend. (Darwin1890:11-2])

For Darwin, the humble dog was man’s reminder of his lowly origins. That such an animal, stooped on all fours and incapable of arithmetic, could express emotion was a daily corroboration of the animal origin of his moral nature.

10/28/2014

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin argued that competition is fiercest between animals of the same genus and especially of the same species:

As the species of the same genus usually have, though by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitutions, and always in structure, the struggle [for existence] will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between the species of distinct genera... We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life. (Darwin 1876: 59)

As a result of competition between allied species, there are selective pressures operating in nature by which a species can discover a niche otherwise uncolonized, so to speak, by its close relatives, and thereby thrive. The demands of that new niche can have curious consequences.

For instance, the slender loris is able to cope with the toxins in its insectivorous diet by slowing down its metabolism, and by using much of its energy to process the toxins that it consumes along with the calories it needs to live. As a result, the loris is a slow animal, apt to spend much of its day asleep, which is much like another animal that has found its place in the economy of nature eating what others don't want: The koala. The Eucalyptus leaves that a koala munches on are toxic in large quantities, and they provide little nutrition, so the koala bear has adapted with a slow metabolism and a sedentary lifestyle. The relative smallness of a koala's brain compared to its overall weight may very well be an adaptation to a life spent eating the little nutritious food that other species turn away from.

Both the koala and the slender loris are able to secure their place in the economy of nature by staking out a place for themselves where there is little competition. If competition between their progenitors had not been so severe, then there probably wouldn’t have been a sufficiently strong pressure for them to turn to their curious diets. Here, we can see the very same principles affecting human entrepreneurs’ specialization in the international division of labor — away from where competition has eroded profits away — affecting the specialization of species in their novel niches in what Darwin called “the economy of nature”, which I think is a most apt phrase considering the forces at work.

09/24/2014

In the aftermath of Scotland's decision to remain in the United Kingdom, Daniel Hannan defends British nationalism as a source of harmony in the debates over Scottish independence in in "The positive case for nationalism". He argues that that nationalism led to the best in human nature revealing itself in people's acquiescence to the outcome of the election.

At the end of the post he takes aim at the view that nations are simply made up lines on a map:

Most ordinary people – that is, people who are not literati or politicians – take feelings of national belonging for granted, and see patriotism as an unalloyed virtue, like honesty or courage. Yet the prevailing intellectual fashion is that patriotism is artificial. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn popularised the idea that nations depend on “invented traditions”. A.C. Grayling held that they were synthetic creations, “their boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars”.

What was once Marxist critique is now academic orthodoxy. Virtually every political science postgraduate who passes through my office has been taught the same bilge about nations being “imagined communities”. And so, technically, they are, in the sense that they exist largely in people’s minds. But this is true of lots of perfectly real things. Why is a £20 note worth £20? Because we agree that it should be. Why is David Cameron prime minister? Because we agree to treat him as such.

Those who disparage or detest nationhood are guilty of an old Marxist conceit: the notion that people can be reconstructed, purged of the “wrong” ideas, cured of “false consciousness”.

As usual when talking about the nature of nations, Mr. Hannan is right, and very much so - even if the cosmopolitan sentiments within us may wish otherwise.

The idea that nations are simply imagined communities, and therefore may be discarded by an Enlightened era isn't a sound argument. The conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premises. Nations may be imagined communities, but that doesn't imply that they are unreal. Here a metaphysical point needs emphasis: Mental objects exist just as extended ones do. (All of you who think that metaphysics isn't necessary take heed. We actually need to know a thing or two about what kinds of substances exist to talk coherently about the world.) Nor are those mental objects necessarily arbitrary.

It's the peccadillo of an adolescent to think that simply because something, such as tradition, exists only in the minds of its adherents that it is therefore made up and arbitrary. As David Sloan Wilson has shown in Darwin's Cathedral, the human mind can develop such objects because such objects have helped our far-off ancestors in their struggle for existence. Imagined communities and other mental objects have biologically evolved because they are useful adaptations.

Adaptations, in turn, have some form that reflects the problems they help solve. One can go as far as to speak of them as embodied knowledge. That embodied knowledge must in some sense be complex and in being complex. Culture's reality as a set of mental object is betrayed by the complexity of those adaptive structures no less than the tactile properties of some sand in one's hands would prove the reality of that sand. If imagined communities and other traditions were simply made up, they would be random in their form. Instead, though, they are adaptive. Britannia, Rule the Waves! tells us something about the problems which have faced British society in the past just as a polar bear's lush fur would tell someone about the environment it inhabited.

There is also an underlying biological explanation of of patriotism that Mr. Hannan doesn't touch on when he writes: "Patriotism, as this blog never ceases to argue, is what makes us behave unselfishly." That explanation is that, as a cooperative species, Homo sapiens has evolved an innate desire to belong to a band. Nature has left Homo sapiens a distinctly cooperative species, and that propensity to cooperate is reflected in a desire to belong to a community because without such a sense of belonging cooperation to a human degree would be impossible. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin argued that traits such as "sympathy, fidelity, and courage" evolved to such a degree in human beings because "selfish and contentious people will not cohere" (Darwin 1989[1877]: 134-135[129-130]).

Even though human society has greatly changed since the conditions of our band-ancestors, human instincts have remained comparatively constant, and so the same instincts that would lead someone to desire the solidarity of a band compel them to find a first-person plural in the nation. In a sense, patriotism is atavistic because it reflects our desire to belong to bands even though patriotism's object is a much wider civilization. There shall always be a human desire to belong impelling people's patriotism, what matters is how culture directs that emotional impetus.

03/21/2014

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing of the labor, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history (1859, 485-486).

What Darwin says about studying the pylogeny of organisms is as important for the study of human institutions. Just as species change based on piecemeal modifications made across generations, so are institutions. When we look at, say, the American Federal government, to really understand it, we have to understand how the Federal government has been used across different generations to solve different problems, and how it has, as a result, been modified across those generations. Just as the problem of paying for war debt after the American War of Independence left a mark on the form Federal government, so did Prohibition and so will the Affordable Care Act.

Understanding the evolution of the Federal government is thus very much a matter of understanding the many histories of the "many contrivances, each useful to the possessor" which have changed its form.

01/24/2014

The proper place to begin any inquiry is with wonder. Wonder is by far the most innocent and pure place to begin inquiry. When we begin inquiry with either a desire to solve a specific problem or to get a certain answer, our perspective is skewed by those desires. Inquiry can lead us anywhere, paradigms can change, and our priors can, nay will change in the course of inquiry. It is a journey which must be begun with the best mindset possible. When we are wedded with certain solutions and even certain problems, we cannot follow the inquiry where ever it may lead.

The theme goes back to ancient times. Aristotle wrote about wonder as the start of philosophy in The Metaphysics:

For it is clear that this science is not productive also from the earthly history of philosophy. For it was because of wonder that men both now and originally began to philosophize. To begin with, they wondered at those puzzles that were to hand, such as about the affections of the moon and events connected with the sun and starts and about the origin of the universe. And the man is who is puzzled and amazer is thought to be ignorant (hence the lover of stories is, in a way, a lover of wisdom, since a story is comprised of wonders). And so, if men indeed began to philosophize to escape ignorance, it is clear that they pursued science for the sake of knowledge and not for any utility… So it is clear that we seek it for no other use but rather, as we say, as a man is for himself and not for another, so is this science the only one of the sciences that is free (982b).

The Origin of Species is a concrete example of wonder as the beginning of inquiry. Charles Darwin’s “theory of descent with modification; through variation and Natural Selection” was a response to his wonder at the orderliness of the biological world. That wonder was one of the clear motivations leading to his enquiry is manifest in the couple of sentences of The Origin of Species:

When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the origin of species - that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it (Darwin 1876, 1).

It was not out of a desire to augment man’s capability for domesticating animals nor a desire to justify certain intellectual priors that Charles Darwin set forth on figuring out that mystery of mysteries. Rather it was out of a desire to trace out the orderliness of the natural work - the orderly distribution of species across the planet and the seemingly orderly line of current species to those known only by their fossils - back to their causes that Darwin was stimulated to write. Darwin’s description of his own wonder also goes to show that the way we approach our inquiry influences our stylized facts.

Charles Darwin even ended The Origin of Species on a note of wonder when he began the final paragraph with the sentence:

It is interest to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, and birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting upon us (Ibid, 429).

Overall, Darwin’s theory of descent with modification was a response to his wonder at the orderliness of the biological world. The project which he sets out in the book is largely about his own quest to still his own mind, and to answer questions which have their origin from his own wonder at the orderliness of the biological world.

That inquiry should begin with wonder is true for economics as it is for any other discipline. When the economist looks out the window, what he sees is an orderly commercial society. Despite disparate interests and selfish propensities, the mammals known as Homo sapiens have managed to work together and to cohere their interactions into something which is colloquially referred to singularly as ‘the economy.’ Across the entire world, human beings have managed to make themselves a part of an orderly division of labor which enables the anonymous cooperation of everyone within that order even though they have no clue that they are in cooperation.

All of the people in Leonard Reed’s “I, Pencil” have no idea that they are cooperating together in order to produce a pencil, and yet they are. “I, Pencil” is the most powerful stylized fact which economists are faced with. Yes, there is such a thing as involuntary unemployment and yes things do go wrong, but all of that disorder cannot overwhelm the greater order of the market. Pencils get made despite all of the forces trying to disrupt their production. Sometimes more pencils can get produced than are needed and sometimes less pencils can be produced than are needed, but nevertheless there is a concatenate order to their production. A concatenate order which we should wonder at, and that astonishment should be our stimulus for doing economics.

08/10/2013

"If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying the god, you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virute every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less."

-Socrates as recorded by Plato in the Apology

In his book, How
We Decide (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 2009),
Jonah Lehrer uses recent evidence from neuroscience to argue that
morality is not a matter of reason, but rather a matter of emotion.
Like Hume, who argued that reason was the slave of the passions and
argued morality to be but feelings of approval and disapproval,
Lehrer finds moral judgments as less a conscious deduction and more
an emotivistic response. In his argument, Lehrer primarily takes
Kant, and the Enlightenment tradition as his opponents, but he argues
that the ethical consensus for thousands of years from the Ten
Commandments to the categorical imperative are based upon a the
erroneous assumption that “our moral decisions are based on
rational thought” (How
We Decide,
pg. 173).

According
to Lehrer, when we make a moral judgment, the motivation for the
decision is not a rational deliberation, but rather a unconscious
emotional reaction. Within his vision of morality, our reason serves
not as a guiding light, but rather as a post-hoc apologist
which serves to make our emotional reactions seem reasonable. The
thrust of Lehrer's argument is thus that it is a mistake to find the source of morality in reason because
people's actual moral judgments are actually based on emotional reactions.

However,
all of this in turn misses the thrust of the Socratic maxim that a
life unreflected is a life not worth living. What Plato is
emphasizing in the Apology
through Socrates is not that at every single point in our moral lives
we make moral decisions based on deductive reasoning taking all of
the evidence into account, but rather that we can reflect on previous
moral decisions in order to shape our character to make better
decisions in the future. This perspective is echoed in Charles
Darwin's description of a moral being in The Descent of Man
as something that can reflect
back on past actions with either approval or disapproval.

Furthermore,
in the Nichomachean Ethics (trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd edition),
Aristotle finds virtue not in singular acts and feelings but a habit
of action that causes the person in question to perform her functions
well. Leaving aside the question of what the proper functions of a
human being are, this is a much different vision of morality from the
vision that is tacit within Lehrer's account in How We
Choose. To suggest, as Lehrer
does, that the essential use of reason in a moral agent's life comes
at the moment of decision making thus ignores a large strand of
ethical inquiry, from Aristotle to Darwin, that places more emphasis
on reflection and the cultivation of proper habits.

Rather than morality being about
singular judgments of the rectitude of an action, morality within
Plato and Aristotle's tradition of virtue ethics is about the
formation of a character able to habitually make the right decisions.
In a classic article in the American Journal of Psychology, “Habit,”
B.R. Andrews defined “Habit” as “a habit, from the
standpoint of psychology, is a more or less fixed way of thinking,
willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental
experience." (American Journal of Psychology,Vol. 14. No.
2. (1908) pp 121-149). Today, “Habit” is first defined in the
Oxford American English Dictionary as “A settled or regular
tendency or practice.” The point of a reflected life was not we
would be able to make deductive judgment for the propriety of each
action. Instead, it was that, by proper reflection, we would be able
to form a character that could reflexively make such decision based
on our habits.

The virtue-ethical
tradition does not reject that moral decisions are often made by
emotional responses within the moment;
instead, it teaches that we need to grow a virtuous character that
can make proper emotional responses informed by our previous
reflections. Rather than denying how moral decisions are made, as
does the Enlightenment tradition, it harnesses and improves upon it.
By living a life well reflected upon, we are able to train our moral
intuitions and shape our emotions to react in the ways that reason
determines to be right. The virtuous person then doesn't need to
deliberate on most moral decisions; rather, she has trained herself
to be able to react almost automatically in a proper manner. It is
not for no reason that Charles Darwin wrote, again in The
Descent of Man,that
the perfect moral being is able to act in the most noble manner
possible purely by reflex.

Explaining
this vision of the moral life in terms of neuroscience would have
been interesting, especially considering that Lehrer has an earlier
chapter about how in decision making ("The Predictions of Dopamine," pp. 28-56). When someone has consistently
repeated a pattern of behavior, he can rely on emotion in making that
decision because of how dopamine in the brain created expectations we
are often only partially to. This echoes the process that Aristotle wrote virtue is required in the opening of the Nichomachean Ethics' second book when he wrote:

Virtue, then, is of two sorts, virtue of thought and virtue of character. Virtue of thought arises and grows mostly from teching; that is why it needs experience and time [i.e., of ēthos] results from habits [ethos]; hence its name 'ethical', slightly varried from 'ethos'. (1103a15-18)

The similarities between the two are striking. Striking enough that I doubt Lehrer became familiar with the Aristotelean literature before opening up a broad-side assault on all of Western moral philosophy.

He misses a great opportunity, though. Since Aristotle relies on a metaphysical understanding of the human person, much of it rooted in his biological thought, within his writings that could be critiqued and improved upon with a modern understanding of the cognitive sciences. Lehrer could have helped provide that; instead, he simply launches on an attack of an entire tradition of inquiry he is not familiar with.

Moving backto the
main topic, that each moral judgment may rely more on an aesthetic
sense of the world than a rational deduction does not mean that moral
decision making is fundamentally divorced from reason. What
commentators like Lehrer, even though it may be working off of the
correct neuroscientific perspective, fail to take into account are
the lessons of the Classical virtue-ethical tradition. As taught by
Plato and Aristotle, the use of reason within moral decision making
is not a matter of on-the-spot decisions, but reflecting upon
previous decisions in order to make possible the gradual growth of a
habitual character that can make such on-the-spot decisions properly.
By ignoring both the role of habits and reason's reflective capacity,
not as simply something able to calculate but to look back on
actions, Lehrer's critique of reason in morality falls short by his
ignorance of virtue ethics.

09/29/2012

It has often been assumed that animals were in the first place
rendered social and that they feel as a consequence uncomfortable
when separated from each other and comfortable whilst together but it
is a more probably view that there sensations were first developed in
order that those animals which would profit by living in society,
should be induced to live together. In the same meaner, as the sense
of hunger and the pleasure of eating were, no doubt, first acquired
in order to induce animals to eat. The feeling of pleasure from
society is probably an extension of the parental or filial
affections; and this extension may be in chief part attributed to
natural selection, but perhaps in part to mere habit. For those
animals which were benefited by living in close association, the
individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best
escape various dangers; whilst those that cared least for their
comrades and lived solitary would perish in greater numbers. With
respect to the origin of the parental and filial affections, which
apparently lie at the basis for the social affections, it is hopeless
to speculate; but we may infer that they have been to a large extent
gained through natural selection. So it has almost certainly been
with the unusual and opposite feeling of hatred between the nearest
relations, as with the worker-bees which kill their brother-drones,
and with the queen-bees which kill their daughter-queens; the desire
to destroy, instead of loving, their nearest relations having been
here of service to the community.

And from The Fatal Conceit by Friedrich Hayek:

Part of our present difficult is that we must constantly adjust our
lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously
within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we
were to apply the rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e. of the small band
or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider
civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make
us wish to do, we would destroy it (emphasis original).

The human animal has by the process of natural selection
been crafted, so to speak, by the forces of evolution to live within
a close society so that each individual may benefit from cooperation
with others in that society. Over the process of human natural
history, the societies in which individuals interact with have become
ever more complex and have involved individuals cooperating with
others that they may not even meet in the course of their lives. This
has culminated in the modern social order defined by the competitive
markets, what Hayek refers to in The Fatal Conceit as the
“Extended Order.”

Man may be
selected for a social existence, but his instincts are now no longer
in sync with the rules now demanded for cooperation in the
extended order. Cultural evolution has been the driving force of
human existence over the past twenty thousand years and, especially
within the last thousand years, the demands of culture are now in
conflict with instinct. I could easily go on about how each human
being must moderate the darker side of human nature in order to
co-exist with their fellow human beings, but that was also true in
the case of cooperation in the tribe just as it is true in the case
of cooperation in the extended order, but I won't.

The far more
pertinent conflict between instinct and the rules of conduct
necessary for the extended order is the conflict between our
instincts for altruism and the demands of impersonal cooperation.
Within the setting of the tribe, or even the micro-cosmoi of modern
society, each human being knows those that they cooperate personally,
they know their needs and desires, and thus know how to act in order
to best advance their chosen ends. This is simply not the case with
cooperation in the extended order, there human beings cooperate with
other human beings on the other side of the planet on a daily basis
when they buy goods fabricated in Thailand or China. It is simply
impossible for each person to personally be acquainted with each
person that they cooperate with on a daily basis, let alone know how
to directly advance the goals those people strive after. Within this
environment, altruism cannot be a guiding rule of conduct because
altruism relies on the altruist knowing how to better the lives of
the people they held. When they cannot know how to better their
lives, then their altruistic act may actually do more harm than good.

Within the
extended order, social cooperation on the market has allowed
individuals to condition their own actions on the desired ends of
other people by the price-mechanisms. This impersonal manner of
coordinating action has proven itself to be the most effective means
of achieving human prosperity, and yet we must accept that this
cultural rule of conduct is fundamentally alien to human beings. We
see this every time that someone complains about a factory in China
or any other perceived distributional error in capitalism: people
want to supplant an order based on an abstract principle not designed
by the human mind, the market-process, with a specific order designed
by the human mind to advance the ends of those in question. However,
to do so would mean to slowly dissolve the rules of conduct that make
possible the extended order.

The human being is
a social animal, but not all societies are the same. As Darwin noted,
the instincts of man have been chosen for a society in which the rule
of conduct was to help other people and in which the individual had
the knowledge to successfully directly work towards the well-being of
those he cooperated with. However, society has since changed while
man's instincts have remained constant. In a world in which each
person works towards the well-beings of others by maximizing their
own personal profits, human instincts are a force which, if not kept
in check, could easily rend that system of cooperation to pieces.